Monday 21st August 2023 - Another Blogger, Glog, Snails and Beautiful Morning

After visiting the Greek island of Symi, on three occasions back in the early 2000’s, we followed James Collins’ blog, Symi Dream. That was until a couple of years ago when he stopped blogging in favour of remunerated writing. However, the other day, Peter visited Symi Dream’s site only to find, in July, James had resumed writing blogs about his life. Since then, I have been in catch-up mode, reading a couple of his blogs each day. When he resumed, James published what he termed as, rules. Reading them, I found I apply a couple of his rules to my blogging. Like James, I don’t visit every event in the village and therefore am not a substitute for a newspaper. Again, like James, I will always try to help those who message me but if there is a complaint about something in the village, I expect that person to address this direct and not to infer I should take up the cudgel for them. Unlike James, I do have an editor. Peter reads my draft posts, picking out typos etc. and occasionally, when I have been a bit on the radical side, he says ‘I don’t think you ought to publish the bit about …….’ That’s probably got you wondering now, as to what has in effect been censored! What you will read, again like James, is random jottings, plus rambles, which are basically a record of our life here in Overstrand.

Those reading this will know what a blog is – a web log, and maybe also what a vlog is – a video log, but how about a glog? This is a word of my own invention which covers the garden log I started writing in July. I thought it would be useful to write about our garden, as and when there is something to record. This will not be published but will serve as something for us to look back on e.g. when I planted a certain shrub, when did Peter start digging the potatoes etc. As far as the word glog is concerned, I wonder if it will ever be included in the Oxford English Dictionary?

Snails in our garden are not tolerated, because of the damage they inflict on our plants, and are moved to an area of rough ground, but it’s a different matter when we see them on our walks. After rain, we often see edible snails (no I am not going to collect and eat them, although I did enjoy a delicious snail dish with dill, courgettes and potatoes in Crete) which we pick up a relocate to the grass at the side. Not edible, as far as I know, are yellow shelled snails which after rain we see on the dried stems of Alexander plants just down from Clifton Way. Following the rain overnight on Thursday, the yellow snails were out in force, as can be seen in the photo, plus there is brown mottled edible one too.

The photo below shows the view which greeted us, early this morning, as we walked along the prom.